Paula Rego paints topsy-turvy worlds and dark fairytales. Her primary concern is psychological narrative, and her exposition is led by women.
Their stories are generally expressed through the portrayal of oblique, private or incidental moments in her subjects’ stories: solitary consternation or reverie; physical discomfort and contortion; private or illicit exchanges behind closed doors. On of her richest sources was Jane Eyre, a novel contingent upon revelations and hidden things.
Rego’s Jane Eyre series was celebrated for its sensitive and unconventional approach to one of the best-loved novels in English literature. The twenty-five lithographs she produced portray significant events in Jane’s life, from her unhappy youth at her uncle’s house and Lowood orphanage, to her arrival at Thornfield Hall, her developing relationship with Mr Rochester, and the discovery of his wife Bertha who, on account of her violent insanity, has remained hidden in his attic for ten years.
Rego’s approach is reliably original, due in part to her personal interpretation of the story. Raised in the wake of Portuguese dictatorship, Rego’s work is suffused with the power of secrets and the unseen. She did not encounter Jane until her sixties, but was struck by the character’s self-possession and passion, and by Brontë’s handling of themes which had proved central to her oeuvre. Historian and novelist Marina Warner observed that in the Jane Eyre series
'Rego has explored, in a myriad different sequences of pictures, the conditions of her own upbringing in Portugal, her formation as a girl and a woman, and the oscillation between stifling social expectations and liberating female stratagems.’
Rego’s discovery of Jane Eyre coincided with an invitation to explore lithography by Stanley Jones, director of Curwen Studios; she had formerly predominantly worked with etching and aquatint. The Cambridge-based studio had been established in 1958 with the intention of introducing artists to a variety of printmaking techniques, and had worked with artists including David Hockney, Barbara Hepworth, John Piper, Elizabeth Frink, Man Ray, Patrick Heron and Howard Hodgkin.